The Oil Drum

Over here grid maintainance got worse and then a lot better after pulic outcry and new legislation. But the investments were going up sharply before the legislation, perhaps they listened to their customers?

The consolidation of the numerous small electricity distributors left the often fairly old 400V - 40 kV network withouth adequate babysitting by servicemen living close to the lines. It is now being replaced in a massive cablification program. The cablification has been speeded up as much as is doable after a for US people tiny but for us large hurricane a year ago.

Even a significat number of 130 kV lines went down, fully grown spruce trees flied thru the air, were stopped by the power lines, piled up on them and brought them down while breaking the wooden poles. They are normally conciderd to be tree fall secure, we dont usually have storms bringing trees down, not storms flinging them thru the air. The rumour is that the backbone grid emergency repair organisation had to empty the civil defence supply of  "meccano" emergency poles for the 220 and 400 kV lines to get 130kV to half a dozen smaller towns. We are not used to have towns with tens of thousands of people withouth power for days. Probably since the 130 kV level most often have complete redundancy, but now every line were broken in a wide swath across southern Sweden.

The "backbone" grid with 220kV, 400kV and HVDC lines is almost completely state owned. My impression is that they historically had a tendency to overinvest. My impression is also that they during the deregulation got the order to have low transmission cost as the top priority. Then the top priority quickly became to start getting rid of the bottlenecks limiting the power trading. But those bottlenecks often are the same as weaknesses in the grid so this goal is doing good in two ways.

Then we had some accidents that maybe had to do with too little maintainance and definately had been less troublesome with better redundance. (Two consecutive cable fires that stopped the feed to the same major parts of Stocholm and an N-2 or almost N-3 fault in the 400 kV network during the summer minimum load that might not have happaned with better maintainance or better redundancy. ) A revision of the 70-400kV network in Stockholm has started, the backbone grid maintainance is increased and the backbone grid is being complemented with new power lines. But it goes very slowly forward due to enviromental bureaucracy, organisational inefficiencies and probably also too little money even when speeding up the work significantly only would add a tenth of a cent per kWh.

The process of keeping the backbone grid in good enough shape for large scale power trading has probably become easier since it is a cooperation between Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden. No country want to have its services limited by another countries capacity, penny wise and pound foolish politicians in one country have been overruled by those in other countries who do not wish to endanger their grid. We now have purely technical grid performance standards that are the same for everybody and political decisions that those standards are to be followed.

For example, when Finland started to build a 1600 MW nuclear powerplant the numbers were run and we immediately started planning for grid strenghtening in Sweden to handle increased power trading and a sudden loss of production if it goes off line to some fault while delivering its maximum capacity. Our greens have tried to stop this investment since it is related to nuclear power but they dont seem to be able to sabotage it. Very few like being cold in the dark and when the old nerds who know the grid say that we realy need this people and the government tend to believe them. They then refer to when things went wrong and anybode can download the official reports about the failures etc. Its quite intresting to read them but I have not found any translations into english.

I  think that unlimited power trading is a great idea. It would probably work everywhere but you have to maintain and increase the grid capacity so that trhe grid can handle it.

The main problem left is who will pay for the spare capacity only used during cold spells every other or every ten years. Those spare powerplants has no economy in them, they are a money sink. About 2/3 of what I think is needed is now being financed by a temporary fee on backbone grid transmission of power. I guess that in the long run it could be replaced by more customers who cut production when the weather is cold and perhaps we could add new powerplants and new such loads such as hydrogen production for refineries and FT-diesel from biomass plants. Another idea is to add larger fuel supplies and remote control to the increasing number of emergency diesels. Instead of staring up one large 40 year old condencing powerplant boiler you start a a few hundred  emergency diesels in hospitals, waterworks, teleco stations, etc where you anyway need them for other reasons then cold spells.